text:
Q: Bad Blocks Exist in Virtual Device PERC H700 Integrated I have a DELL server with PERC H700 Integrated controller. I've made RAID5 with 12 harddrives and the virtual device is in Optimal state, but I receive such errors under linux:
sd 0:2:0:0: [sda] Unhandled error code
sd 0:2:0:0: [sda]  Result: hostbyte=0x07 driverbyte=0x00
sd 0:2:0:0: [sda] CDB: cdb[0]=0x88: 88 00 00 00 00 07 22 50 bd 98 00 00 00 08 00 00
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 30640487832
sd 0:2:0:0: [sda] Unhandled error code
sd 0:2:0:0: [sda]  Result: hostbyte=0x07 driverbyte=0x00
sd 0:2:0:0: [sda] CDB: cdb[0]=0x88: 88 00 00 00 00 07 22 50 bd 98 00 00 00 08 00 00
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 30640487832
sd 0:2:0:0: [sda] Unhandled error code
sd 0:2:0:0: [sda]  Result: hostbyte=0x07 driverbyte=0x00
sd 0:2:0:0: [sda] CDB: cdb[0]=0x88: 88 00 00 00 00 07 22 50 bc e0 00 00 01 00 00 00
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 30640487648

But all disk are in Firmware state: Online, Spun Up.
Also there is not a single ATA read or write error in any disk in the raid (I check them with smartctl -a -d sat+megaraid,N -H /dev/sda). The only strange thing is in the output in
megacli:
megacli -LDInfo -L0 -a0
...
Bad Blocks Exist: Yes

How could there be bad blocks in a Virtual Drive, which is in optimal state and no disk is broken or even with a single error? I tried "Consistency Check", but it finished successfully and the errors are still in dmesg. Could Someone help me to figure it out what is wrong with my raid?

A: The "Bad blocks exist" indicator of MegaCLI refers to the Soft Bad Block Management table which works as follows (quote from the MegaRaid docs):

If the CU detects a media error on the source drive during rebuild, it initiates a sector read for that block. If the sector read fails, the CU adds entries to the Soft Bad Block Management (SBBM) table, writes this table to the target drive, and displays an error message.
Additional error messages are displayed if the SBBM table is 80% full or 100% full. If the SBBM table is completely full, the rebuild operation is aborted, and the drive is marked as FAIL.

The SBBM table would not contain the same "bad" markings as what is reported by SMART as the criteria and methods of action are very different.
Take a look at which of your drives is reporting errors using megacli -LDPDInfo -aAll and give it a closer examination.

A: I got this issue recently. There was 'Bad Blocks Exist: Yes' message on the array, but all LD and PD was fine. There were errors on read on that array.
I found command -LDBBMClr which clear that fkng table.

megacli -LDBBMClr -L0 -a0

(change number accordingly to your adapter/array)
Please do not forget to remount filesystem (or reboot), as earlier read errors may cause some issues later.


Safran Electronics & Defense proudly offers the CARNAC range of Automatic Flight inspections Systems (FIS), a family of high performance and cost-effective FIS designed and built for the testing and verifying of NAVAIDS as well as the validation of all PBN procedures.
The CARNAC range of FIS can be found performing flight inspection in over 40 countries.
Drawing on more than 30 years of expertise in FIS and avionics equipment, Safran has the expertise to propose a custom-designed solution to meet all the requirements for its customers thanks to the CARNAC family solutions.
The entire family of CARNAC FIS complies with all International Flight Inspection Standards.
CARNAC family provides all requested functionalities, from flight inspection of ILS, VOR, DME, MKR, NDB and radar systems to validation of PBN procedures. CARNAC is the only system that offers full inspection of RNP and RNAV navigation systems as well as guidance indications for calibration across the entire range.
CARNAC is unquestionably user-oriented for Flight Inspectors, with "Replay and Reprocessing" modes making it easy to analyze all captured flight inspection data, enabling the editing of flight inspection reports and fulfilling training requirements.
With the utilization of the CARNAC intuitive Man-Machine-Interface (MMI) a reduction of flight times has resulted, thus improving the cost effectiveness in delivering the optimum flight inspection service.
CARNAC is automated for enhanced integrity and comprehensive data analysis while at the same time the Flight Operator retains the full control of the FIS, including the selection of different data to be displayed on screen which enables more thorough and in-depth analysis.
Safran Electronics & Defense pays close attention to all customer feedback. As a result of new innovations requests from the operators of FIS, CARNAC is consistently improved and upgraded. Continuous contact with the flight inspection community through the use of hotline assistance, annual user meetings and maintenance support groups is a key feature in helping the customers to improve safety.
CARNAC is designed for and by flight inspection teams.


text:
package jp.gr.java_conf.jyukon.detabu;

import android.content.Context;
import android.view.View;
import android.widget.AdapterView;

import com.google.android.glass.widget.CardScrollView;
import com.squareup.otto.Bus;

import java.util.List;

import javax.inject.Inject;

import jp.gr.java_conf.jyukon.detabu.event.ItemChangedEvent;
import jp.gr.java_conf.jyukon.detabu.event.ItemSelectedEvent;
import jp.gr.java_conf.jyukon.detabu.model.Item;

public class CardScrollViewImpl implements ICardScrollView, AdapterView.OnItemSelectedListener, AdapterView.OnItemClickListener {
    private final CardScrollView mCardScrollView;
    @Inject ItemCardScrollAdapter mAdapter;
    @Inject Bus bus;

    public CardScrollViewImpl(Context context) {
        mCardScrollView = new CardScrollView(context);
        mCardScrollView.setOnItemSelectedListener(this);
        mCardScrollView.setOnItemClickListener(this);
    }

    @Override
    public void activate() {
        mCardScrollView.activate();
    }

    @Override
    public View toView() {
        return mCardScrollView;
    }

    @Override
    public void setItems(List<Item> items) {
        mAdapter.setItems(items);
        mCardScrollView.setAdapter(mAdapter);
    }

    @Override
    public void onItemSelected(AdapterView<?> parent, View view, int position, long id) {
        bus.post(new ItemChangedEvent(mAdapter.items.get(position)));
    }

    @Override
    public void onNothingSelected(AdapterView<?> parent) {
    }

    @Override
    public void onItemClick(AdapterView<?> parent, View view, int position, long id) {
        bus.post(new ItemSelectedEvent(mAdapter.items.get(position)));
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


From N. 7th Ave (driving North), turn right onto East Griffin. Drive East on East Griffin, just past the railroad tracks. Turn left onto Manley Rd and drive North for approximately 1/2 mile. Turn left onto Gallatin Park Dr. House of Clean is the second building on the left hand side.
House of Clean moved from its old location at 1815 Kensington in 2012. We are now located (formerly Big Sky Supplies) at 2409 Dearborn Ave.


People with social phobia dread social situations and live in fear of public embarrassment. Their anxiety often permeates all public activities, including eating out, or visiting a public lavatory. Research shows they catastrophise about social situations, what people think about them, and what negative social events say about the kind of person they are. By correcting these biases, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can be an effective treatment. However, it's not known whether all of these biases need to be addressed for long term recovery, or if instead the correction of one particular bias is crucial. Judith Wilson and Ronald Rapee (Macquarie University, Sydney) investigated.
Thirty-six people undergoing a 12-week CBT programme for social phobia completed questionnaires before and after their treatment. Their long-term recovery was assessed three months later.
After CBT, the participants were less likely to believe a hypothetical social situation would cause others to think ill of them; were less likely to think it reflected badly on the kind of person they are; and less likely to think it would have long-term negative implications for their relationships and/or career. Of these, only reductions in the participants' belief that negative social events revealed bad things about them, independently predicted reduced social phobia at three months.
Whereas previous research has suggested social phobics are overly concerned by what others think of them, this research highlights the importance of how they view themselves. "It is ultimately the negative inferences they draw with regard to the self that may be important for maintaining the disorder", the authors said.
Wilson, J.K. & Rapee, R.M. (2005). The interpretation of negative social events in social phobia: changes during treatment and relationship to outcome. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 43, 373-389.


Book – Non-fiction. By National Museum of the American Indian. 2007. 256 pages. Introduction to Native American history and contemporary culture.
If you've ever wondered about where Native Americans came from, whether they really used smoke signals, or if they wore socks, this book has the answers. From clothing, food, origins, ceremonies, and language to love, marriage, art, music, and casinos, Do All Indians Live in Tipis? debunks widespread stereotypes and answers all of the most common questions about Native Americans. Accessible and enlightening, this is the perfect introduction to Native American history and contemporary culture.
The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian is dedicated to working in collaboration with the indigenous peoples of the Americas to foster and protect Native cultures throughout the Western Hemisphere. The museum's publishing program seeks to augment awareness of Native American beliefs and ways of life and to educate the public about the history and significance of Native cultures.


Earned the I Believe in IPA! (Level 20) badge! Earned the Land of the Free (Level 61) badge!
Earned the Beer-giving (2017) badge! Earned the Indie Brewing Company badge! Earned the Lager Jack (Level 3) badge!
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The 'Festival of Cultures' returns to The Forum this Saturday (26th September). Organised by Norwich MIND, this is a great celebration of the different cultures that have made Norwich their home! Join us for stalls showcasing cultures from around the world, stalls, food, workshops and performances including Cuban latino music from Jose Ferrera, taiko drumming, bollywood and Bulgarian dance!
Join our event page here to be kept up to date: https://www.facebook.com/events/1457769844544724/.


text:
9 Things Reality TV Shows Get Wrong About Real Estate
Written by Emily Hochberg on March 29, 2019
Insider scoop and secrets on Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles and other popular TV shows.
If you love real estate like we do (love doesn't even begin to encapsulate it!), then it's likely you've caught any of the real estate TV shows currently saturating reality TV. Maybe your eyes roll at the staged scenarios, or perhaps you indulge in a full-on binge. Either way, these shows grab attention by tapping into the thrill of the market, without any of the risk.
Real estate reality is fun, and a healthy dose of voyeurism. Peek into dream homes, watch bidding wars unfold, and find out who would really be willing to pay $60 million for a crumbling mountain mansion. It's a preview of international markets and what money can (or can't) buy.
Whether it's a guilty pleasure or must-see TV, just remember that in real estate, reality TV is only so real. "It makes it look very easy. You don't typically see a lot of failures," said Redfin agent Alec Traub.
Los Angeles-based Traub works in the high-end market, and surprisingly, loves these shows.
"I sometimes watch House Hunters or Flip or Flop but mostly Million Dollar Listing, which is fun because I've done deals with those agents. The properties on Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles are properties shown on TV are often homes I know," he said. "I'd watch even if I weren't an agent, but because it's my industry, it's interesting to see how the business is portrayed. But I'm not watching myself; I'm watching a glorified version of my workday."
As such, Traub, a luxury agent in LA, is quick to point out that the portrayal is far from accurate.
"It's a lighter version of what I do. They depict agents and structure the show like it's fantasyland real estate. I can watch and kick my feet up and think, 'how nice would it be if it all happened that easily?'"
So what's actually reality? Here's what Alec thinks you should consider the next time you tune in:
Home sales don't close as quickly on TV
"There's so much more to buying or selling a home, and it's so much harder to put one together, than what you see on TV. Million Dollar Listing makes it seem like a closing takes a matter of sitting down, making a couple of phone calls, and within five to 10 minutes, you're done. They never show the weeks of back and forth negotiating, counter offers and discussing terms."
TV doesn't include what happens after agreeing to price and terms
"The hard part starts once you've accepted the offer and then have to go through escrow, inspections and an appraisal. But those steps are much drier subject matter with far less drama and excitement. A 40-something minute show would never devote minutes to line items on an inspection report. But for me personally, it would be pretty interesting to see how Million Dollar Listing's Josh Altman handles a low appraisal or a buyer with financing troubles, which are still common in the high end market."
More home closings fail than you think
"Agents face failures every day, such as lost listings or clients. Every now and then, you'll see someone get fired on Million Dollar Listing, but that's few and far between. In reality, about one in every three to four offers on a home in Los Angeles falls out of escrow for any reason, which you won't get a sense of watching the show."
Finding clients isn't as easy as it looks
"Million Dollar Listing only shows the listing or client after it's successfully signed. They leave out the process of how they sourced that business in the first place. Clients are often referenced as a friend or colleague, with no mention of how that relationship began, or whether the agent had to knock on doors first."
The pool of agents is not accurately represented
"Million Dollar Listing makes it seem like there are about a dozen agents in all of Los Angeles, when really there are thousands. The agents have a certain presence, but there are just four or five of them. In LA, you're constantly competing against so many people for every client and listing consult."
However in smaller luxury markets, certain agents do dominate
"In high luxury price points like Beverly Hills, Bel Air or the Hollywood Hills, it's true that only a handful of agents tend to represent those buyers and sellers. You see the same people; there's maybe 10 agents in each of those neighborhoods and everyone else is on the periphery."
Real estate TV shows misrepresent agents
"Million Dollar Listing doesn't deter the negative image of a real estate agent having a sleazy reputation. Episodes show agents making backhanded deals that perpetuate the stereotype. But that's the drama of TV. If someone followed me around with a camera, they'd be bored. The real work can be frustrating and tedious, and wouldn't translate well to TV."
Whether you want to believe it or not, the shows are staged
"I only watch House Hunters International when it's in a cool destination like New Zealand, to see what properties are like. But it's harder to watch knowing it's all fake drama of 'I can't decide!' when the buyer has actually already purchased a property. Million Dollar Listing is also staged to a certain extent. The circumstances around a buyer or property might seem tense and uncertain, but they always know the offer will come together."
The agents on Million Dollar Listing are real, successful agents–and people!
"I've closed with Madison, the Malibu agent on Million Dollar Listing. That was great–there was no ego, and we worked well together. I've also had good interactions with Josh Altman and Josh Flagg on their properties. When the cameras aren't there and it's not a production, they're down to earth, normal, regular people just trying to help their clients buy and sell homes. The show is edited and only shows a certain over-the-top side of the business. But when we work together, we all have the same focus: closing a home for our clients."
See original at: https://www.redfin.com/blog/million-dollar-listing-los-angeles/
719-445-2344debbie@falconhomebuyersllc.com

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
British artist transforms children's hospital
2-Feb-2017
Acclaimed artist, Morag Myerscough, creates bespoke bedrooms at Sheffield Children's Hospital
Acclaimed British designer, Morag Myerscough, has been drafted in to create bespoke bedrooms for young patients at Sheffield Children's Hospital.
The artist has brought a giant beachball to Old Street roundabout, a 10m-tall camera obscura to Mexico City square, and now she is brightening the wards of Sheffield Children's Hospital by designing art schemes for 46 en-suite bedrooms and six multi-occupancy bays. The rooms are the latest in a series of commissions by Artfelt, the hospital charity's arts programme, as part of its mission to transform patient spaces using art and design.
"I'd never done bedrooms before," said Myerscough. "I loved the challenge.
Complex environments
"They're really complex compared to corridors or more-public spaces - especially in a children's hospital because you're creating for patients who have various conditions and there are a lot more controls involved."
The layout of the new rooms, designed by Avanti Architects, are in the hospital's new wing and were created specifically to help make the clinical areas more comfortable.
By hiding plugs and wires away behind Formica panels, the rooms were given a softer, domestic touch.
Because she was working in a clinical area, everything Myerscough produced had to be totally sterile and easy to clean, which meant painting straight onto the walls wasn't an option.
"The brief I was given was that whatever I wanted to do I would have to do on Formica," she said.
"The wood grain on Formica is actually screen printed onto paper and then laminated.
"To get the really pure colours that I wanted, I had hoped to screen print my own pattern onto the existing wood grain.
Unfortunately, we couldn't do that because you can only screen print one or two colours on to the paper before it disintegrates.
"In the end we scanned the wood grain and then digitally printed the patterns, making sure it all matched up. Then we printed it onto paper and laminated it like normal Formica.
"We pushed the process to ensure we kept the warmth of the wood grain. We managed it – but it did take a year."
Myerscough and Artfelt manager, Cat Powell, gathered statistics from patients to see which colours and patterns they preferred, and spoke to nurses to explore which clinical factors needed to be considered.
For Morag, this consultation process is one of the most-essential steps in her creation of public art.
"I'm not an expert. I'm not a nurse and I haven't been a patient too often.
"When you're working in hospitals it's a very sensitive area.
"As an artist you can't lose that vision of how things could be, but at the same time you need to take people's concerns on board.
"It's a collaboration, rather than a compromise."
She added: "Although the rooms are for children, I didn't want them to be childish because children of all different age groups will be staying in them.
"I also wanted to create somewhere parents would be happy to spend time too. It was just about making a bedroom that you felt good to be in."
She designed four schemes which are rotated throughout the rooms, including a paler colourway specifically designed for children who have conditions like autism and may have an intolerance to bright patterns.
"I feel very excited about these bedrooms," said Myerscough.
"Perhaps it's a bit extreme to say that they are ground-breaking, but it does start a different dialogue about how bedrooms can be made for patients.
A positive outcome
"From the work I've done in healthcare I know that it's phenomenally positive for people to have art in hospitals.
"Going into a grim and grey room isn't going to make anybody feel good, but to go into a room that lets you know that people care about you and they're thinking about you – it's a no-brainer really.
"It makes people happier and more assured that everybody is concerned about them and wants them to get better.
It's an amazing feeling knowing that the rooms will benefit patients at Sheffield Children's Hospital.
"I've previously done workshops with kids in hospitals and you can see how hard it can be for them and their parents.
"To make an environment that makes a difficult situation even remotely better, I can't do work that's more important than that really."
Sheffield Childrens Hospital
Avanti Architects
New bedside alarm monitoring system launched at Sheffield Children's Hospital
Altro adds colour to waiting area at Sheffield Children's Hospital
Work gets underway on new children's cancer ward
£16m to introduce digital prescribing in hospitals
Artfelt Anywhere delivers social distancing arts programme to young patients
Sheffield Children's Hospital installs Younique doors inspired by wildlife
Appeal for helipad at Sheffield hospital receives charity boost
Sheffield Children's Hospital helipad appeal latest
Building Better Healthcare Awards 2018: the winners
IHEEM Annual Awards - the winners
2017 Building Better Healthcare Awards - Winners are announced
Well-known UK architect honoured at international design awards
Sheffield Children's Hospital collaborates with software scheduling specialist


Recently, there has been an increased focus on "mental workouts" as part of the holistic approach to fitness. And while we've known for some time the therapeutic and creative benefits of practices such as writing and art, many may not know that reading is equally beneficial.
Unfortunately, Americans are reading less and less. According to Pew Researchers, we're picking up books at a slower pace and access to e-books hasn't done anything to encourage sustained reading (let alone more reading).
According to researchers, and as reported in Psychology Today, reading fiction especially helps to optimize brain function and productivity. It immerses us in a universe where our brains dream up the actual images from the text we consume. It's an incredibly powerful mental workout that nourishes our creativity, and yet we're craving visual, screen entertainment more than ever.
What does that mean for the go-to mental workout we've depended on for so long?
According to a recent report by Hubspot on visual content marketing for 2017, people remember information with an image at the rate of 65 percent three days after exposure. If they "just" hear information, the rate drops to 10 percent.
It's also estimated that by the end of the year, video content will make up 74 percent of internet traffic and 80 percent by 2018. Sadly, four times as many survey respondents would rather watch a video about a product than read about it, and the vast majority of marketers say video imagery is a priority, gets a better response, and is on their agenda for the coming year.
In other words, in the digital era and age of instant gratification, consumers are simply used to having their senses overwhelmed. Some research is promising, such as the fact that imagery can help people remember details days after exposure. However, at what cost? Reading, particularly fiction, has long challenged people to create worlds and entertainment for themselves.
Imagine how upset you were the last time a book you loved was turned into a film—and the characters, setting or other details were nothing like what you imagined. That's just one element within the cry of, "The movie is never as good as the book." While there are certainly other variants at play, there's also the fact that nothing compares to our own imagination. When we're able to be creative and make a world based on an outline by a skilled writer, ready-made complementary imagery just can't compare.
Novels tend to engross us, and researchers found that fiction encourages not just creativity but empathy. According to scientists at Emory University, and revealed in the journal Brain Connectivity, reading fiction is akin to utilizing visualization when improving muscle memory for sports players. That might play a role in why there's always more fiction purchased than non-fiction books. Fiction also allows for escapism, which is exactly what many people are chasing (often unsuccessfully) when spending numerous hours in front of a screen playing a video game, on social media, or otherwise overwhelming their senses.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 42 percent of college graduates never read a book after finishing their studies. The same study found that those who do like to read fiction are encouraged by personal enrichment. "I love being exposed to ideas and being able to experience so many times, places, and events," said one respondent in the now often-quoted research findings. Living vicariously through another person was another big draw.
While some of these findings can be unnerving, you're in control of whether to indulge in this mental workout or not. Just like the best workouts, it doesn't feel like one at all. As 2017 just begins, challenge yourself to read a certain number of books this year. It's the easiest workout you'll ever enjoy.


BN3TH uses a combination of design and construction for your everyday comfort. The 3D "pouch" provides support from every single angle, a rub-free gusset allows your underwear to contour around your body and carefully placed stitching makes it great for all body types. This unique fabric is 50% more absorbent than cotton, extremely breathable, wrinkle and pill resistant – fits seamlessly under a suit, your workout shorts, or jeans - you only need one style of underwear in your wardrobe.
A nautical print in Caribbean blue. Cruise through your day with high sights on the horizon!
Classic and chic. Comfy and sleek.
A nautical print in classic navy. Cruise through your day with high sights on the horizon!


Today's small business loan renewal process takes too long, costs too much and results in lower client satisfaction. This is not a winning approach in an increasingly competitive future. In fact, those that maintain the status quo will miss earnings growth as clients move their business relationship, including critical core deposits and fees, to an institution that can renew their loan fast and easy and with no credit interruption.
Technology adds significant workflow efficiency gains and a reduction in labor investment to the process of renewing performing small business loans. Incorporating technology to shrink the labor- and paper-intensive steps in a loan renewal process can reduce the labor investment per loan by more than 90%, or $2,159.
Multiply this by the number of renewals a bank does each year and the magnitude of opportunity for earnings and efficiency gains is staggering.
Most bankers would agree that a small business loan with a satisfactory repayment history, no major change in market economic conditions and strong financial performance shouldn't require the same underwriting process as an entirely new loan. Financial institutions should be able to efficiently and appropriately underwrite the renewal utilizing a uniform and short-form process unless a borrower's payment history, financial ability to pay or any other easily recognizable weakness has occurred. It is also logical that any loan up for renewal that has well-defined weaknesses should be underwritten based on a longer and more traditional in-depth underwriting process; managing risk becomes more of a focal point.
Despite these logical differences in how various renewals should be processed, many financial institutions follow for each loan the same labor–intensive process they use to approve and close a new small business loan.
Many institutions have complicated and inefficient processes to manage small business loan renewals. Some have implemented a short form loan process to manage small business loan renewals. However, commonly these short form process changes don't go far enough and the institution often falls back into the trap of performing steps that mirror a traditional original loan approval process.
Loan renewal processes are commonly found to be inefficient, unstructured and inconsistent across an institution, particularly where the institution has multiple markets and lending teams spread widely over a geographical region. Labor and its associated costs are the primary issue preventing many institutions from an efficient renewal process. As an example, commercial lenders invest hours in visiting clients to gather required loan information. They spend hours evaluating and populating information for a credit memo. Further, a common pet peeve of a commercial lender is spending hours researching deposit, loan and fee information related to a loan relationship for the credit memo. Similarly, credit analysts spend considerable time keystroking and identifying double entry adjustments related to updated financials for borrowing relationships which may have multiple businesses, individuals and affiliated limited liability entities. They also spend time researching and gathering third party information for the renewal including pulling information from credit bureaus.
Virtually all of these labor-intensive steps and investment of time can be replaced by technology. Technology-based workflows bring efficiency, structure and uniformity to the loan renewal process. Institutions have the ability to configure and customize a loan renewal workflow to incorporate the uniqueness of the institution and its staff. The technology-based workflow establishes phases and steps a loan goes through at an institution. Once this workflow is developed,it becomes the engine that supports the sequencing and efficiency of the loan renewal process. This smart technology-based workflow runs automatically in the background of the loan renewal and can be adapted with pre-determined events and dynamic changes, as a specific loan process may need to change. Not every loan starts a workflow and is completed exactly in the same manner. However, an efficient and effective loan renewal workflow will more often follow the same process track.
Institutions looking for the limited number of significant opportunities for earnings and efficiency gains in lending should be sure to note the opportunity provided by bringing automation into the loan renewal process. Through a combination of the use of new technology and a centralized small business lending portfolio team that includes dedicated portfolio managers and credit analysts, financial institutions have the potential to reduce labor investment by 90 percent, or roughly a cost reduction of $2,159 loan. In making renewals more efficient, they will also serve borrowers better and faster.
Neill LeCorgne is Vice President of Banking at Sageworks, a financial information company that offers lending, credit risk and portfolio risk solutions to over 1,300 financial institutions. He is responsible for working with financial institutions to enhance their operating strategies including improving efficiency in the lending process. Neill has over thirty-three years of experience in the financial industry including eleven years as President and Director of a multi-bank holding company in the state of Florida, seven years as manager of a corporate banking team at a super-regional bank and fifteen years serving financial institutions as Director of Business Development for the Federal Home Loan Banks of Atlanta and Seattle.


White two-sided 40 pt. mat board with a solid white core.
* Ultimate clean and neutral pH boards are available in traditional art and photo sizes.
* Ideal for mounting or matting photographs and presentations of all kinds.
The type is photography presentation board.


text:
What makes a good cyber range?
Justin Pelletier is the director of the cyber range program at the ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Infosec Skills has some great cyber ranges, but Pelletier shows the organization's massive, immersive simulations. Because they've also included cyber range technology for beginning cybersecurity pros transitioning from other jobs, we cover what's involved in making a good cyber range, how to break down those early barriers of fear and self-doubt and how quickly you can move into a cyber career after hands-on training.
0:00 – Immersive cyber ranges
3:13 – Getting into cybersecurity
5:06 – Studying data breaches
11:03 – Cybersecurity at the Department of Defense
14:02 – Cyber range education at the RIT
16:20 – Work of the Global Cyber Range
24:20 – Cyber range scenarios
38:30 – What makes a good cyber range?
42:00 – Successfully getting into cybersecurity
45:33 – Cyber range upskilling
48:47 – Cybersecurity hiring changes
51:30 – Learn more about the cyber range center
Chris Sienko: Cyber Work listeners, I have important news before we dive into today's episode. I want to make sure you all know that we have a lot more than weekly interviews about cybersecurity careers to offer you. You can actually learn cybersecurity for free on our InfoSec Skills Platform. If you go to infosecinstitute.com/free and create an account, you can start learning right now. We have 10 free cybersecurity foundation courses from podcast guest Keatron Evans, six cybersecurity leadership courses from, also podcast guest, Cicero Chimbanda, 11 courses on digital forensics, 11 courses on incident response, seven courses on security architecture, plus courses on DevSecOps, Python for cybersecurity, JavaScript security, ICS and SCADA security fundamentals and more. Just go to infosecinstitute.com/free and start learning today. Got it? Then let's begin today's episode.
Today on Cyber Work, I'm talking to Justin Pelletier, the Director of Cyber Range programs at the ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology. While we're pretty proud of our cyber ranges here InfoSec Skills, Justin positively blows my mind with a walkthrough of his organization's massive, immersive simulations. And because they're also involved in cyber range technology for beginning cybersecurity pros who are transitioning from other jobs, which is the sort of people I love speaking to, we were able to talk about what's involved in making a good cyber range, how to break down those early barriers of fear and self-doubt, and how quickly you can move into a cyber career after hands-on training. All of that and a few of my awkward attempts to shoehorn in references to the movie wargames today on Cyber Work.
[00:01:52] CS: Welcome to this week's episode of the Cyber Work with InfoSec podcast. Each week, we talk with a different industry thought leader about cybersecurity trends, the way those trends affect the work of InfoSec professionals and offer tips for breaking in or moving up the ladder in the cybersecurity industry. So if you've listened to even more than one other episode of Cyber Work, you know that we talk about our InfoSec Skills platform pretty regularly, and specifically about the hands-on component, the cyber ranges. Cyber ranges are a way to engage with the problem-solving aspects of cybersecurity using hands-on simulations of real situations.
Justin Pelletier, my guest today, his work is with the Cyber Range and Training Center at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and an interest to me because it's in line with our own trading methods and objectives. Although, as you will see soon, it's on a whole other scale. So I wanted to talk to him about his own experience and some of the success stories he seen with students using cyber ranges and also why they might be the most fun way to learn cybersecurity.
Justin, thanks for joining me today. Welcome to Cyber Work.
[00:02:55] Justin Pelletier: Thank you, Chris. I appreciate you having me on the show.
[00:02:58] CS: My pleasure. So I always like to start out the show by getting a sense of where your interests and all this came from. When did you first get interested in computers in tech and what got you excited about cybersecurity as a calling? What was the draw?
[00:03:13] JP: Yeah. I always love telling the story, because it really was a little bit of a love affair, frankly. So I remember very clearly, I went to a tag sale with my mother when I was just a kid. And I saw this book on programming with QBASIC, which – Or program with BASIC, I should say, which was included on all the old computers, 3.1, and whatnot, and Microsoft. You get the QBASIC function. So I started learning programming, and then just kind of went with it from there.
Fast forward to contemplating what career I might start off on as a high school senior, I got accepted actually to go to school for art. And my mother, again, an influential role, she said, "You know, you might consider being an art teacher instead of an artist so you can actually support a family or something one day. I'd like some grandkids." She always like to throw that one in.
[00:04:07] CS: Right, right, right. Yup.
[00:04:09] JP: And I kept following that line of thinking and said, "Well, I really enjoy art, but I also have this great computer hobby. I love creating code. I love solving problems with computers. And that's actually a pretty high-demand field. I could probably make more money and support the family even better if I had –"
[00:04:24] CS: All those grandkids, yeah.
[00:04:26] JP: Yeah, fight. And so, then that just kind of just went from there. So I switched to computer science before I started off in college. And then sort of that hook was set deep. As far as my transition to cyber, that really started when I got into the military. So I started off as a coder in my computer science undergrad. And then I joined the I joined the military and pursued a career in intelligence. And immediately my company commander said, "Hey, you've got a computer background, and you're an intelligence officer. I want you to work on signals intelligence." So kind of the coding side of intel. And from there it just unfolded and became cybersecurity career.
[00:05:05] CS: I imagine that it sort of pushed your technical skills in different directions as well by [inaudible 00:05:12] that way. Okay. So, yeah, I like to start my research on my guests by going to their LinkedIn page, because each one always tells a story especially with people with a very storied career. So your deep study in computer sciences isn't hard to see. You had a bachelor in computer science and a doctorate in computer information, system security information assurance. And you even have it on there. It's rare that I get to see the name of someone's doctoral dissertation. And since yours is quite germane to our listenership, can you tell me about your dissertation titled Effects of Data Breaches on Sector Wide Systematic Risk in Financial Technology, Health Care and Service Sectors?
[00:05:51] JP: Sure. Thanks. I'm impressed you got through the whole dissertation title in one breath. It's a long one.
[00:05:55] CS: Breath control .Yeah.
[00:05:58] JP: Yeah. I'm happy to gush about it, like probably most folks with their dissertations. I'm impressed that even you looked up – Even you saw this thing.
[00:06:06] CS: Yeah. Oh, yeah. No. I always hear like, yeah, it's something nebulous on LinkedIn, like, computers, "I did computers." And you're like, "Oh, this looks something. What are we talking here?" Okay.
[00:06:14] JP: Yeah. So, actually, sandwiched in between these two more technically-focused degrees, I had a Masters of Business Administration. And part of what I – So part of my mandate when – As a civil servant, I was kind of working some cyber problem sets. Included a host of things that I just couldn't rope into a dissertation that would be publicly disclosed, right? So just open publish.
So I said, "Well, what's obvious open data that I can use and draw some inference about and would be kind of interesting and germane to the community?" And so I looked at stock market data in particular, which is open and obvious, and started sort of dusting off some of those skills that I picked up in my finance courses. And really started to examine the sector-wide risk calculations that follow a breach.
And so, kind of pulling on that thread a bit, we know that stock prices take a bit of a tumble after a breach in a publicly traded market. But the price effect is actually changed over time. And there's been an increasing call for more regulation to account for that diminishing stock price movement, saying, "Hey, people aren't taking this serious anymore. We need more regulation to motivate compliance in an increasing problem with cybersecurity.
And so, being a self-avowed libertarian, I said, "Well, maybe government intervention isn't always the right answer. Let's see if there's any market-based incentives that can help motivate." And so, looking at the way that the community, and by this, I mean, publicly-traded companies and investors, calculate risk as it pertains to their base cost of capital. So an investor wants a high return for a high risk. Yeah.
So when there's a breach, sometimes that reflects is a stock price movement. Other times it might be reflected as what we call a systematic risk or a beta coefficient on the regression. So a lot of math, a lot of plotting and kind of data mining and crunching. And it turns out that there's an increasing effect on the risk perceptions in the marketplace even for near neighbors.
So for example, target gets breached, Walmart is perceived as more risky, which is an interesting effect. Yeah.
[00:08:41] CS: Yeah. And unexpected, I imagine.
[00:08:43] JP: Yeah, I wasn't really expecting to see that. But it was a pretty cool finding. And I think that's actually become an interesting and relatively popular conversation topic when I engage with senior leaders about cybersecurity. They say, "Well, cyber, it's very technically demanding. It's very interesting in some ways. But what does it really mean for our organization?" And then to translate it into that lexicon of risk really speaks to board level leaders and C-suite executives across the board, because that's their language, is risk management.
[00:09:16] CS: Right. Now. I mean, can you account for what that sort of cross-company risk element? Where that stems from? Because that is a surprising finding. Like, do you have a sense of what was causing that?
[00:09:32] JP: Great question. So there's some theoretical precedent that we could point to in what we call convergence behavior and herd mentality with stock price movements. So we have this kind of analog where you follow the trend, everybody's kind of doing the thing, right? So that's one. There's another maybe more rigorously-defined component that we call spillover effect. And so, it's sort of an exogenous shock or a systematic risk behavior that we might look at as a non-controllable risk.
So for example, you have a company in California, well, they're in your corporate stock price, and it's movement and risk evaluation. There's this kind of uncontrollable risk of earthquakes. It's an exogenous shock. It's a systematic risk component that you can't really control for. It's out of your hands. But it still affects you.
And so, if there's an earthquake in one part of California, the market tends to say, "You know, these California-based companies, yeah, they're subject to earthquakes." So it's – Yeah, anyway I could elaborate —
[00:10:40] CS: So while you're moving things around, and you're like, "Okay, we got to dump Target. They got breached." You're like, "Yeah, I don't feel good about any of these big box places. Let's get them out of here." Yeah.
[00:10:48] JP: Yeah. And it might not necessarily translate into an adjustment in actually the holding. Just what the market seems to demand for the risk cost.
[00:11:01] CS: Got it. Okay. So, going back to the previous work, you spend almost two decades working with the Department of Defense. We mentioned that before. And that you sort of got into cybersecurity during this time when you were sort of asked to move over to the sort of technical programming side of it. Can you talk about, without breaking any rules, or clearances, or anything, can you talk about some of the cybersecurity related work you did while there and some of the real-world lessons you learned on that job?
[00:11:27] JP: Um, yeah, I can discuss a little bit. So as you mentioned, nearly two decades of work with the Department of Defense. I have the pleasure of being a civil servant, both as a general schedule employee and as a uniformed person in the reserve component, as a guardsman and as a reservist now.
I will say that I gained a great appreciation for a lot of, surprisingly, non-technical things. So certainly, there's application areas that are highly technical and quite interesting, I might add. But from a pragmatic perspective, sort of looking at the trajectory of my career, I will say that I received some of the best leadership lessons and training that you could hope to have through the Department of Defense. And I think we all maybe can appreciate that there is no amount of directive-level leadership do this, because I told you, so that will make you violate your conscience or stand up and take fire, like, shoot at somebody or get shot at, right? So there's this whole sort of crucible of leadership development that I found really beneficial.
And really leveraging the understanding about who you're working with and the quality of your camaraderie to achieve what's almost impossible is really been one of the major takeaways. And so, not so much cybersecurity related work. But that was an absolute real-world lesson.
I'd say another category of lessons learned as certainly the way that we might incorporate cyber as an element of national power. And so, traditionally, we have these sort of four pillars of national power projection and strategic planning, diplomatic information, military and economic. And I think what we're seeing with cyber is it definitely touches the information, right? Because you have this whole idea of information dominance and controlling the narrative. And there's cybersecurity tools that can impact that, right? You can apply AI and amplify certain messages or create new ones out of thin air that don't even – You know, fake news. And that does play, I think. It's a diplomatic as well.
But then sort of the military component, seeing the way militaries use cybersecurity as an integrated factor with kinetic action, whether it's for sort of target development in a kinetic cycle, namely, I'm going to put bombs on a target. I want to know who I'm – So let me use some cyber to develop the target. All the way to that sort of information dominant side, which, not for nothing. I think we're seeing some of that going on in Ukraine right now.
[00:14:03] CS: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, yeah. So, from getting your MBA at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I see that you came back in 2018 to Head the Cyber Range and Training Center, which is sort of the focus of our discussion today. What drew you to return to your alma mater to engage in this course of study and teaching?
[00:14:20] JP: Um, Chris, it's sort of a deeply personal story I'll share with you and your audience. So I was down in the beltway working as a civil servant, working for the country. And loved the job. It really enjoyed the mission. And then my mother came down with Lou Gehrig's disease. And she needed just full-time care. So I realized very quickly that the cost of living in DC is not conducive to living off savings as a 30 something year old and taking care of mom.
So I resigned my position as a civil servant. Moved back to Rochester where my wife is from, and got some help from her family to care for my mother until she passed away. Simultaneously, as kind of finishing up the PhD, and did a couple of stints of active duty during that process, and then said, "Okay, well, what's next?" And reached back out to some of my mentors when I was doing my MBA I stayed in touch with and sort of shared with them, "Hey, I'm kind of at a crossroads. And I got the PhD. I was really intending to use this in my civil service career. But now I don't quite know what to do. I don't really feel like moving back to DC. And my family priorities have changed. I really like it in Rochester."
And actually, a close friend now said, "Hey, we're trying to build this program at RIT called Hacking for Defense, which started at Stanford and has a pretty good community here in the United States. And we want to bring this. And being that you have an MBA focused on entrepreneurship, and a military background, you'd be well suited to maybe help bring this program to RIT. So maybe you consider doing an adjunct thing?"
Well, one thing led to another, and I got actually invited to apply for a full-time faculty position. And then the university decided to build a cyber range and apparently thought I'd be a good guy to lead the effort. And here we are.
[00:16:19] CS: That's fantastic. So, all right, well, let's get into it. Can you tell me about the work of the Global Cybersecurity Institute Cyber Range and Training Center? So I know you have a presentation here for me, and I'm looking forward to seeing it. But just in terms of structuring the thing, I was just curious what your program offers. What type and levels of students you're targeting? Whether these are complete beginners, people with some baseline computer science background. And also, talk about some of the exercises and processes students work through via cyber ranges.
[00:16:48] JP: Yeah, sure thing. And, yeah, let me go ahead and share my screen, Chris. And, please, I love what I do, and I'm happy to gush about it forever. So just tell me to stop if I'm going too in the weeds. Okay? So first and foremost, we just had an announcement actually yesterday formally that we are now the ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute. So we've had a generous gift to a partnership, really, with ESL, which essentially stands for Eastern Savings and Loan. It's a regional financial institution that's committed to cybersecurity, clearly. And they've now the sponsor of the institute. And that's within RIT.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the university, other than to say that I was surprised to learn that we're the 10th largest private university in United States, and have a really strong alumni base, which is pretty amazing. We have a global presence, not just in Rochester, New York, but in Croatia, Dubai, Kosovo, and so on.
One of the things that RIT is really founded on is this idea of cooperative education and experiential learning, which translates really well, I think, to what we do in the range. So I'll get more into that. But we have one of the oldest and largest co-op programs in the country. So when, regionally, my wife was saying, "Hey, RIT means jobs. Like, that's what it means around here to say, "I went to RIT." "Well, you got to get job out of it, didn't you?" And that's kind of what we're known for.
And so when we thought about building this sort of global cybersecurity institute a few years ago, we said, "Well, we're good at a few things," a lot of things actually. "And so let's play to our strengths and sort of build on to that and create something a bit more holistic than just doing the traditional sort of engineering approach to things."
And so, certainly, we built on top of a core technical discipline of computing security. At RIT, we have a department of computing security. And there's about 500 undergrads in that department, another 150 or so master's students, and maybe between 20 and 50 PhD students depending on the time. But also, we have computer science and software engineering, human computer interaction, engineering, so on.
And so, certainly, there's a lot of technical disciplines. But integrating cognitive psychology, public policy and other components of the cyber process and problem set was really endemic to our mission. So we built upon that to create a multidisciplinary center. And we had some great seed funding through an alum, Austin McChord, the founder of Datto, who worked with us. And we got some extra funding from New York State to construct this building and to build the institute. And that's really meant to provide for professional training and technology transfer through the cyber range through the Eaton SAFE Lab. I'll talk about those in a minute. And also, to advance fundamental capabilities of what's possible through our core research agenda as an academic institution, and also to leverage and inflict that globally through our partnerships.
So now, let's talk a little bit more about the facilities, right. So we have this conference center. We've got a satellite location to the Cybersecurity Experience Center, and the National Hall of Fame, Cybersecurity Hall of Fame. And really, the design is to make cybersecurity feel and be accessible to folks who would not normally consider it as a career.
And really, at the anchoring of that is a lot of what we do in the Cyber Range and Training Center, which you see depicted here. It's a bit of a war room. It's sort of like a SOC in some ways. You see some other views of it here. And so, in that, we kind of mix a lot of the technical knowhow with a bit of – We actually have a game design development department. And we have some real scholars in game design and live action roleplay as an academic pursuit. So the term gamification means a lot of things to a lot of folks. It's kind of overused. But we actually apply some of those principles to creating experiences that are immersive and accessible, so that we can allow folks to move past – You see, we bolded here, move past that tabletop exercise into a live fire cyber environment. And so we do that by replicating, at scale, network systems, devices and so on that allow for folks from all over the world, both on site and remote, to work out real realistic scenarios.
And we have audio-visual integrated across the buildings so that we can have a satellite office location in one of our classrooms upstairs or across the globe in actuality. We'll have telepresence. And even – This is really fun. So we have programmable HVAC back and lighting and sound. So if you imagine a scenario of a cyberattack and all this stuff unfolding, we can actually make the temperature really go up. Not just figuratively.
[00:21:44] CS: Yes, right, right.
[00:21:44] JP: Right. You're sweating because of the tension, because also because the heat is on. Yeah, exactly. And the lighting, the blinking red and the sirens and all these different things that make it feel like you're part of something, even if you're a completely non-technical, which is really important to us because it's more about creating the change leadership. And really a core part of our mission. That multidisciplinary approach is about the people and processes as much as it's about technology.
So we kind of tie that together. And you see this disaster piece theater, as a quote from Mike Loft over at Slack. When we were talking to him about what we were going to create, he said, "Oh, I know [inaudible 00:22:21]. This is disaster piece theater." And in a lot of ways it is, right? So we bring in executives from across the industry, HR, finance, legal folks that have no interest or knowledge about technology necessarily, right? They're not cyber nerds like us, right? So they're folks who – They're kind of a different kind of finance nerd or whatever.
And then we create these multiple simultaneous dilemmas that allow them, force them really, to triage and become a little bit of a first responder on behalf of the organization. So they can say, "Well, what is most important?" We got to prevent loss of life, then destruction of property, and then everything else, right? But until you're in that scenario of actually moving past the checkbox, kind of compliance list of a traditional tabletop, but usually not always, but often only the CISO and the IT team really care about. And now put it into the language that HR can understand where, "How do we manage internal communications when we have a site out or some crisis going on?" Like, things matter, right? And so you're into that. It's really hard to appreciate. So that's a big part of what we do in-person in the range. And that's all enabled by a backend infrastructure. You can see some of the highlights listed here. I mentioned the ability to replicate a global system.
So in any of our training scenarios, we can spin up and have running simultaneously 5000 VMs like a Windows desktop or something equivalent, or 10s of 1000s of PLCs are sort of low lightweight devices that have embedded systems running. And you can see kind of our backend hardware that we have managed in sort of a private cloud, arrange cloud, with our data center. I could talk a lot more about this. It's amazing what we're able to do. But maybe a few use cases would be a little more interesting.
[00:24:20] CS: Absolutely. First, I have to ask, how many times have you watched the movie War Games?
[00:24:24] JP: Oh, a couple of times.
[00:24:27] CS: I feel like I'm – Yeah, I feel like I'm conversing with Dr. Falken here. This is great.
[00:24:32] JP: That's funny. Oh, I guess, I'd watch it with that in mind, because it's been years. Yeah, it's been a while.
[00:24:37] CS: So, yeah. So talk about the use case. I was trying to imagine like what the scenarios are and the scales of them. And if there's like – If you have like sort of like skill levels where we start with like an entry level one and then go to sort of like full scale meltdown and all that.
[00:24:52] JP: Yeah. Yeah, so I'll talk a little bit about one of the things that we built the range to accommodate as sort of an edge case, an edge case scenario. So every year, RIT is lucky to host the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition. We also host sometimes the Cyber Defense that UTSA they run at the national level. But we're the global hosts of the Collegiate Pen Testing Competition, CPTC.
And here you see an image of their final presentation. So what we do is we get college students from across the planet. They start off with a with a simulated infrastructure that we host through the range. And they pen test it and give us sort of that report on what they found? What remediation they recommend and its ability to impact the company in its kind of core mission. They start off at eight or nine, depending on the year, regional hosts. I could range it. We have five in the US, one in Canada, one in Europe, one in the Middle East. And we're still growing. But that's our footprint right now. And then the winners of the regional host come on to RIT for the finals.
What you see here is actually the most recent finals that we just hosted in January. Every year, we build a new critical infrastructure company. And we model it using these this architecture. So in this case, the company is called LeBonBon Croissant. It is a food manufacturing and retail operation.
[00:26:28] CS: [00:26:28]. All right. Thank you.
[00:26:31] JP: Yeah, yeah, it's a running theme within the competition, the organizers, the volunteers and stuff. For some reason, croissants are like the biggest thing. So it's fun, too. So we [inaudible 00:26:40].
[00:26:40] CS: [inaudible 00:26:40] about a croissant.
[00:26:41] JP: Yeah, right. So that was the name of this year's company. Last year, we had Next Generation of Power and Water. So we built like a regional electric, like a –
[00:26:53] CS: Water purification, or –
[00:26:56] JP: We had actually a nuclear power plant, a dam with a reservoir, and then water treatment facility all integrated. So the reservoir water would power the dam, cool the power plant, and be useful for the community's water in a medium-sized city, maybe a couple 100,000 people or something. And we had all the way from like the programmable logic controllers controlling the sluice gates on the dam, all the way through to the customer database and like simulated readings from smart meters and stuff. And so, they had this sort of sweeping architecture.
And in this example, with the food manufacturer, we had the manufacturing floor where they're making kind of these candied croissants and confections. And then there's all these different sort of operations technologies built into the systems. And then the customer database, and their logistics system, and their ERM and different things like that that really replicate a company, and the email logs and the chat systems and so on.
What you see here is actually their culminating – At finals, they have a culminating final presentation. And we have a series of volunteers that roleplay as board members of this fictitious company. And again, back to a point I raised a little while ago, I didn't make this competition. I happen to help run it now. But from its design, it requires technical experts to speak at a language that board members can understand. And really, that's about risk.
And so, you see the risk classifications. So they're now looking at criticality and severity of impact. And then trying to map that to the core operations of the business to a bunch of savvy technologists that happen to be senior executives and sit on boards themselves and can say, "I understand what you're saying. Most board members wouldn't. I don't know." And that's part of the feedback and evaluation.
[00:28:49] CS: Right? And so this goes way beyond just you get 200 points if you deploy the right tool at the right moment and things like that.
[00:28:56] JP: You got it. Yep. So it's much more of a surgical approach, right? Because it's pen testing. And it's meant to simulate. So if they bring down the dam, which, of course, the students did. They're too aggressive on their NMAP, right? [inaudible 00:29:06] aggressive NMAP scan. Brings down the PLCs. Lesson learned. Learn it here instead of when you're doing a pen test on a real one. And we and we had the role players calling, "Are you trying to flood the town? The governor is on the phone. And this is the third time today. And what are you doing?" So that ability to be professional and respond appropriately is really built into the system.
I think I've covered most of this. But one highlight is that we have a chance to cycle through critical infrastructure themes in a way that allows us to build a repository of environments that we can then train on in the range with kind of different training. But also, we're able to be a little bit of a forcing function for some of the best white hat students out there to learn technologies that they would never –What student gets Modbus in their undergrad, right? But they're trying to figure out what a dam runs on. And that's part of the protocol. So they're going to study.
[00:30:03] CS: So that sort of answers my previous question about what level of baseline of computer science or cybersecurity background. This is work for the sort of like the elite students at this one.
[00:30:13] JP: Yeah. this is the cream of the crop. Absolutely. And again, this is one of our edge cases. And you can see here, we're able to generate a lot of data, which we can then use for research purposes, which is really a cool part of being affiliated with an academic institution. We've got a couple dozen researchers that can say, "Oh, here's a bunch of Splunk logs. Here's a bunch of syslog outputs and stake froze VMs that were infected or used to attack. And let's do some forensic analysis," and so on. So those are really cool.
And we publish this data and we make it openly available to the community so others can do research on what attackers might do in these environments. So that's one edge case. I want to zoom out a little bit, because one of the – So almost everything that I've just talked about, and I know I'm getting excited and blabbering a lot. So, I'm sorry.
[00:31:01] CS: It's okay.
[00:31:04] JP: But all that's well and good. And yeah, we can run a competition virtually. But what do we do with all that kind of gee whiz AV stuff? That war room in COVID? So we had all these plans to do this kind of disaster piece theater, and prep courses, and in-person training with all this great stuff. And then COVID, and we're like, "Well, we got to do something differently."
And so we went back to do some discovery in what's the gap? And in our discovery, we realized that we interviewed several dozen CISOs, and program managers, and technologists and found that it's not the 10% of people that are cyber enabled that are really the core. It's the 90% of people that only think about cyber that are the problem. From two perspectives, right? One, they're the ones clicking all the links that they shouldn't click, right? Which is infection vector dejure. And then the other part of it is, "Well, we need more cyber folks to come into the workplace. I don't care if they're entry level, or the cream of the crop. We need more, right? Just turn up the volume on the whole thing."
And so we said, "All right. Well, let's create something that will allow folks to have a baseline understanding and ability to project cyber skills and keep growing so they have good foundation, right? So we built a career launch pad that you can see described on the screen here. But really, it's about as close to a boot camp experience as you could hope, like a coding boot camp or whatever. With no technology background required. We, of course, do some testing to make sure that we've got good logic and reasoning and attention to detail.
But I'll tell you, we've had some amazing stories about like life transforming coming through this. No tech background, folks who were sanitation workers, construction workers, nurses, receptionists all come through our program and get great cyber jobs afterward. So we do this all online. And of course, we're built on this immersive experience. And so we built a company for them to roleplay as interns at. This is brick wall cybersecurity, Brick Wall Cyber. You can Google it. It looks like a real company. We've had folks reaching out, "Hey, can you help us out?" They think it's a real company. But this is a simulated firm that allows our bootcamp learners to go to work on day one. So they learn by doing instead of just getting a bunch of lectures and stuff, like a traditional academic experience.
And so we run this in a way that lets them answer emails, trouble tickets, and so on with colleagues in a built environment that feels like a real company. So they get some professional experience. Even if they've been a sanitation engineer, never set foot in office, other than to take out the trash or whatever, they can still get an appreciation for what it's like to work in an office environment so they can be successful on day one.
And of course, the tools that they get exposed to are relevant, we think, and germane so that they might not be that cream of the crop expert by the time they're done. But they know where to go to keep learning. They've got a lot of resources in. You talk to them about Zeek, or whatever it is, and they say, "Oh, yeah. I know what that is." And they and they know where to keep learning if that's a big part of the job you've got for them.
[00:34:18] CS: Right. Yeah, it's that first breakthrough that's always the sort of scariest part, especially if you don't feel like you come from that world.
[00:34:27] JP: Yeah, absolutely. And actually, one of the cool things, one of the coolest things, I got to say, in building this and really thinking about the impact. We've had a couple of years now, almost two full years of running the career launchpad and the boot camp. And RIT is the home of the TAC Net National Technical Institute for the Deaf, NTID. And so we have a large deaf population of learners on campus. And it's part of the fabric of our university. We're proud to be to be integrated with NTID and the deaf community in a meaningful way.
And so we started offering American Sign Language-led and facilitated bootcamp courses, right? And in working with the team from NTID, I've come to appreciate how meaningful some barriers to entry really can be for those that have challenges, right? And it makes me really appreciate the difficulty of a diverse and inclusive workplace. And that means a lot of things, right?
But one thing that's very common, I think, is that there's – Especially when there's a communication barrier, like with deafness or being hard of hearing, there's a difficulty in sort of proving that you can do the job when you can't explain yourself very easily to your future employer. And so, we started looking at, "What else do we do at RIT that could actually help?" And so, you see here I've got on the slide the Eaton Cybersecurity SAFE Lab. We do a lot of partnerships between faculty, staff, and students, where we do real-world security engagements, pen testing, social hardening, policy audit, whatnot.
And so we took that, and we built that opportunity through that lab into an apprenticeship series for those bootcamp grads for sort of the entry level folks who have these barriers, so that they can then – Instead of saying, "Let me explain to you in a way that is hard to do when you have communication barrier, or barriers across diversity targets." Instead of explaining it, let me show you. Here's my portfolio of things that I have done. That's so much more convincing when there's a cognitive diversity issue or linguistic limitation or something.
Again, there's a lot of categories of diversity. And one thing that, really, I think translates across a lot of those categories is if you can show what you've done, the need to be able to prove that you can do it is really solved. And so, we actually just got grant funding to build an apprenticeship program. And so we're hiring this year. We're hiring six apprentices as our pilot to do testing. You can see a list of capabilities and areas of expertise and so on, but to fit in with the lab and test voting devices, and energy devices and things that we're already doing in the lab. So I'm really, in particular, excited about that. There're some great projects that we've done. Voting machines are really an important one. We're pursuing some accreditation with the Elections Commission to get certified as a voting device testing lab, and a series of other things that are really exciting just in their own right. But to have sort of this pathway created for folks who couldn't afford to come to a great university like RIT in a traditional kind of four-year degree thing, or couldn't get in, or just college isn't for them. It enables that whole population of folks who would never normally consider our career field as a potential. And it makes these life-changing really great jobs open up to them. So it's really a cool and motivating thing. So I'll leave that there. I could gush. I could gush. I could gush. But that's enough for the dog and pony.
[00:38:28] CS: That's great. I was going to say that I was – Before this, I was having trouble imagining how we were going to sort of transition back to relatively low-level cyber skills discussions or cyber range discussions after talking about the War Room and the disaster piece theater and so forth. But I think with these other programs that you're offering as well, I feel like that's a pretty natural transition point right there. So that's great. We do actually have a fair amount of commonality in that regard. I mean, we began offering cyber ranges a couple years ago. We've recently upgraded to Cyber Range 2.0 going from a command line only environment to something more virtual and sort of replications of environments and so forth.
And so, I guess I wanted to talk to you a little bit about – Can you speak about what makes a good cyber range in terms of creating a problem to be solved or a concept to be taught using this method? What are some considerations in terms of how you create a cyber range? I mean, like creating a capture the flag exercise, I imagine, there's some art to building sort of the puzzle or the understanding that isn't either far too easy or unfathomably difficult.
[00:39:42] JP: Yeah, that's a great question. I think one of the things that really shines out to me as sort of the brightest light in the set is a dogged pursuit of the value add for the core customer. Yeah? So depending however you define that, it could be entry level, it could be cream of the crop, it could be anywhere in between. But identifying what the needs are for the learning objectives and then crafting the experience around that, where on the level of autonomy should we build this thing, right? How much should they be expected to know out the gate? Do they need some hand holding and really detailed instruction set at the first couple of exercises? And how much can we take off the training wheels? By the time we get to the end of the program so that they're now operating more self-sufficiently? I think that's probably the most important thing that I would recommend to consider when building an exercise or building a range experience, is really, what are you going to do to serve the people coming through? And how best to do that given where they're at?
[00:40:50] CS: Right. You have to understand whether or not sort of rooting around and being – Without enough information is actually part of the challenge or not, because I think at a certain high-level, the idea, especially with like capture the flag or something, is like, "Yeah, there are no training wheels." And there might not necessarily be like an end point. And you should know this by now. But you can't start there. You can't just like walk into a German class and have the teacher speaking only in German, unless you're very confused. So, yeah.
[00:41:16] JP: Yeah, I think that's a really great – And I think we share this, absolutely, in that approach to saying, "Okay, well, let's meet them where they're at and take them a few steps forward. And so that eventually they're able to speak fluent German." But if you don't start with how to say hello, and how are you, you're never going to get there.
And it feels so intimidating in a field like ours, because it's so technically deep and wide. And there's acronyms out the wazoo, right? You could spend days and days and still not know what somebody is talking about, because there's so much there. And so, starting with those kind of bite-sized chunks and making them understand that they can do the thing by showing – Like, don't just tell them they could do it. But they get some hands-on experience and say, "I can do this." It's like the light bulb goes on, you know?
[00:42:00] CS: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. This is – Yeah, it's something that regular people do. Not just sort of super big brains. Yeah.
[00:42:07] JP: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:42:08] CS: So one of the issues we see with a lot of people who would make good cybersecurity professionals, as we were just saying, is that they don't always feel comfortable with higher order computer science work. And so, therefore, they don't think there's any place for them. Can you talk a little bit about some of the success stories? I mean, you mentioned people in other professions getting into – Doing your programs and your cyber ranges. And can you talk about any particular cases that you found especially interesting or inspiring?
[00:42:38] JP: Um, there's a whole bunch, actually. I could name names, but I haven't necessarily gotten a permission to do that.
[00:42:50] CS: Sure. Of course.
[00:42:52] JP: So I'll speak a little bit more generally. We have a few folks that have agreed to be interviewed about the impact of our training programs and so on. And you can find those on our website. But just to just to kind of keep it at a high-level. I've seen folks who lost their – Smart folks lost their jobs because of COVID. The whole industry got pulled out from under them. They were hospitality management-level person for 5, 10 years. COVID hits, everybody gets laid off.
And then they were able to not only learn the fundamentals of cyber, but then also have this industry background that they could then apply it to. They know the hospitality industry. So now they can help add cyber to the whole tool chain needed desperately for access control and other things, right? Similarly, we had a sound engineer, right? So kind of a niche skill. And an entrepreneur, right? So he's got his own business. He's part of the crew that helps set up for a really high-level acts that folks will pay a bunch of money to go see in concert and so on. So the whole sound engineer, the lighting components, and so on, how do you make sure that that isn't going to get hacked in the middle of your show? What's your differentiator as a small business owner? You have to say, "You know what? You can trust me to handle this, because I have this background."
So this is a really kind of a cool addition to some – There's definitely some technical components to the sound engineering and the lighting and so on. But it's a very different sort of technology than what you'd normally expect with cyber.
And again, I've mentioned nursing. So, of course, a great opportunity for somebody that understands that experience of caring for a patient and can translate the cyber need to the nurses and doctors and all the folks who are like, "Ah! I just want to serve the patient." "Okay, well, you can do that better if you protect their information. Here's how to do it. Don't just click cancel on the next security feature you see." And, "Oh, by the way, let me understand how that works." And then relay that to the company so that they can improve the experience as a user, right? It's a really unique and cool experience. So again, I could talk a lot more about examples of that but —
[00:45:12] CS: No. Tat ties in nicely. And we had a previous guest who – And we basically got to that point as well in terms of, "Oh, if I have these skills, where do I go now?" And it's like, "Well, whatever industry you're interested in any way, there can be a cyber component to that, whether it's libraries, whether it's finance, whether it's hospitals, whether it's –" So, I guess, as we're kind of getting to the end of the hour here, but I want to talk a little bit about, as you said, with COVID, a lot of people lost their jobs very quickly. Entire industries kind of fell apart in the scene for the foreseeable future. Can you talk about the sort of rapid upskilling that happens with cyber ranges? I mean, like, if you're in that point right now where you're like, "This sounds really interesting. I feel like I can contribute to this. I want to start learning immediately?" Can you give like sort of an estimation of how long they might take them to sort of feel comfortable, have a demonstrable set of experiences that will then in terms – Have someone else be able to take a chance on a relative newcomer like that?
[00:46:18] JP: Yeah. I mean, obviously I'm biased, because of our bootcamp, our career launchpad, that foundations level. We built that to most rapidly career transition in 16 weeks. And those are 16 grueling weeks. That's why we called it a boot camp. As a military guy, that means something, right? It's like [inaudible 00:46:37]. But that's the shortest possible timeframe that we could engineer and feel comfortable saying, "Actually, no, this person knows enough to be effective on the job one, or day one of the job."
I will say that when we when we spoke with a lot of the hiring managers that would employ these folks, our trainees, a huge range of responses. Some said 10 years. Maybe? Right? And I think there's some real truth to the range, in that there's things that you can do using tools. If you know how to use a tool, you can be effective after only a handful of weeks, really, maybe a couple of months. Even if you don't – You can put together an Excel spreadsheet or something. But to program something? No way, right?
But even after a dozen weeks or so, you could be effective in being part of a cybersecurity platform. Being a level one SOC analyst maybe with some mentorship and some ongoing training and so on. Though, I think we always have more room to grow. So even though I've been doing this – I mean, we've been doing this for decades, right? And it's like there's always more to learn. There's always some – You lift up a rock and there's like a hundred more things to uncover. This is such a deep field. It's really exciting.
So I think, probably the biggest thing to just keep in mind for those that are thinking about the field is that you're never going to stop learning, which is, to be, part of the fun, really. But also, not to be intimidated by that. Yeah, you can actually be effective even if it's just helping people understand how to enable security by default on their system. In a very simple way, just being able to communicate with people or run a few log traces and see, "Oh, there's something going on here." And then escalate it to the next level up. And that can actually make a material difference, because we need, really, all hands-on deck.
[00:48:46] CS: Can you speak at all to – I mean, we're sort of talking around the notion of the skills gap, that there's all these jobs out there and not enough people to fill them. And as you said, there are plenty of opportunities for people who have this sort of minimal skill set who are transitioning into a new part of their career. Can you talk at all to the sort of HR hiring side of this in terms of whether there needs to be a loosening up? I mean, the archetype is always – It's an entry level job. We need you to have a CISSP, or something like that. I mean, do you see any sort of changes in terms of the hiring landscape of companies being more willing to take a chance on, as you said, a former, hospitality person who's done through a boot camp and is learning very quickly?
[00:49:37] JP: Yeah. We surveyed interviewed a bunch of folks, maybe a couple hundred folks. And we found absolutely that certifications like CISSP, they're really HR filters. They're very useful, by the way. And I'm a CISSP holder. A lot of compliments for (ISC)² squared and all that they do. But it's not the only thing that the folks who actually have to work with the hires care about.
So more specifically, sometimes it's the price of admission to have certs like that to get past the HR filter. But fundamentally, the only thing that the actual person is going to employ, like the team lead or even among the colleagues, all they care about is can the person do the job? And that is all skills-based. Whereas the certs by the nature of their accreditation are very much knowledge-based certs. So you know how to do the thing, or you can figure out the answer to a problem, fine. But applying that in the real world is really difficult to test from a certification perspective.
So having hands-on skills, even if it's a running list of your hack the box achievements, or whatever it is that's showing that you're doing the thing, that's what people care about. And if you can't get through the front door with HR filters and all – Then talk to folks at BSides or some other community-driven event and say, "Hey, I'm breaking into the field. Can you introduce me to some of your colleagues?" And you will get a job. You don't have to go through the front door all the time. You can be a warm lead. And as long as you're interested and motivated, you will land a job. There're enough jobs out there for sure.
[00:51:30] CS: Absolutely. So one last thing here, I saw sort of throughout on your presentation, but if our listeners want to learn more about either Justin Pelletier or the Cyber Range and Training Center at RIT, where should they go online to look?
[00:51:43] JP: Sure. So LinkedIn is probably the best place if you want to get a hold of me personally. If you want to learn more about the Cyber Range, about the goings on at the ECL Global Cybersecurity Institute, check us out online at RIT, the Rochester Institute of Technology, rit.edu. If you type in our RIT cyber, you will get us. If you just Google RIT cyber, you'll get us.
And I just talked about a large component, but only a small component in big picture of the overall mission, right? So we have all these research initiatives and some really cool stuff going on across the bigger RIT with relationship to cyber. So it's not only the Cyber Range itself, but I invite you to check us out on online there.
[00:52:31] CS: Awesome. Justin, thank you so much for joining me today. This was amazing, frankly, I'm blown away.
[00:52:37] JP: Thanks, Chris. It's a pleasure. I'm really a fan of what you're doing and how you're doing it. So I'm very pleased that we're able to link up today.
[00:52:44] CS: Well, thank you very much. I like to hear that. I appreciate it. So as always, I'd like to thank everyone listening to and supporting this show. Every week, new episodes of the Cyber Work podcast are available each Monday at 1pm Central both on video at our YouTube page. Just type in InfoSec, you'll find us. Or an audio wherever you download your podcasts.
So I want to make sure, speaking of cyber ranges, that you all know that we have a lot more than weekly interviews and cybersecurity careers to offer. You can actually learn cybersecurity for free on our InfoSec Skills platform. If you go to infosecinstitute.com/free and create an account, you can start learning right now. We've got 10 free cybersecurity foundation courses from Keatron Evans, six cybersecurity leadership courses from Cicero Chimbanda, 11 courses on digital forensics, 11 on incident response, Python for cybersecurity, JavaScript, ICs and SCADA and more. Just go to infosecinstitute.com/free and start learning today.
Also, speaking of cyber ranges, we have a monthly challenge. If you go to infosecinstitute.com/challenge, you'll go through three little challenges escalating in difficulty. And if you complete all three and you get the little diploma and send it to us, you could be eligible for free prizes each month. So check that out, infosecinstitute.com/challenge.
Thank you once again to Justin Pelletier, and RIT and the Cyber Ranges. I've already forgotten the new brand. What's it called again? ESL –
[00:54:10] JP: ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute.
[00:54:12] CS: Thank you very much to the ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute and Justin Pelletier. And thank you all for watching and listening. I will speak to you next week.


text:
AA blasts cover sold by travel agents
By by Helen Groom 2003-10-09T00:00:00+01:00
Unregulated travel insurance will continue to damage the reputation of the insurance industry, even after FSA regulation begins, according to the AA.
AA research showed that 60% of travellers buy their travel insurance through their travel agents, most doing so at the time of booking their holiday.
AA Insurance managing director Andrew Briscoe said the exemption of travel insurance sold by travel agents from FSA regulation would continue to damage the industry.
Briscoe said a major problem was the lack of awareness of the small print in policy documents, particularly the necessity of declaring pre-existing medical conditions, and how this might prevent them from making a successful claim.
He said a failed claim coloured a customer's perception of the industry as a whole.
"We welcome proper regulation of the industry by the FSA because it will help build customer confidence in insurance products and the way they are sold.
"But the exemption of travel agents from regulation is a glaring omission that could undermine the good work being carried out by the FSA," said Briscoe.
Top 50 Insurers 2015: No 3 RSA
GWP: £3.9bn Management Group chief executive Stephen Hester's future at RSA is now in question after rival insurer Zurich's £5.6bn bid to buy RSA collapsed. Zurich blamed problems in its own business, rather than anything untoward it found in RSA's, for its withdrawal from the deal. But ...
Top 50 Insurers 2015: No 4 AXA
GWP: £3.3bn Management Current ABI chairman Paul Evans continues to run the AXA UK group, which comprises AXA's non-life, life and health business. From 1 January 2016, the UK general insurance business will be run entirely by Amanda Blanc after she takes over the only remaining ...
Top 50 Insurers 2015: No 5 Direct Line Group
GWP: £3.1bn Management The top team of chief executive Paul Geddes and chief financial officer John Reizenstein continue to lead the UK's biggest personal lines insurer. If the company's performance on the stock market since its 2012 flotation is anything to go by, the pair and their ...


2SCALE has supported the development of five agribusiness clusters in the soybean partnership in the Eastern Corridor of Northern Ghana. In the various clusters, 2SCALE builds capacities of the project stakeholders and facilitates business relationship/linkages of value chain actors based on identified needs. Access to finance has been one of the major constraints in the partnership affecting farmers, especially women. Other rural woman entrepreneurs engaged in off-farm economic activities (soybean processing, trading) face similar challenges.
Access to finance for smallholder farmers in Ghana is full of challenges. High interest rates (average 33%), demand for collateral by banks, inconvenient loan application processes, and perceived high risk of the sector are some of the challenges resulting in low financial support to farmers and other agri-entrepreneurs. Of the total loans issued by the financial sector, only 3.9% goes to the agriculture. This has resulted in limited investment and often leads to inefficiencies in the value chains and threaten their sustainability as well.
To address the issue of women's access to credit, 2SCALE piloted the Village Savings and Loans Association (VSLA) in 4 selected communities in the Banda Borae cluster in 2016, involving 80 women. With these VSLAs, the women met weekly to contribute through the purchase of shares by each member. After a period of contributions, opportunity is opened for borrowing from the accumulated savings, which is paid back based on agreed (favourable) terms. The money is later shared out based on individual contributions after a period of time (9 months for the first cycle, and 12 months for subsequent cycles). This pilot was successful and triggered the need for replication in other clusters. In 2017, an additional 16 VSLA groups (320 women) were formed.
After two years of implementing the concept, access to finance has improved tremendously for the women. Some have invested in inputs and other services, while others have expanded their farms. Opportunities have also been created for the women to engage in other income generating activities as an alternative source of livelihood. They now have a reliable and affordable source of borrowing, on terms that meet their peculiar needs, and also benefit from the interest they pay on the loans during share out (at the end of the cycle). So far, a total credit of GHS101,440 has been disbursed through the VSLAs. New groups are being formed without the active participation/funding of 2SCALE. It is foreseen that the VSLAs will in future be linked to the rural banks/credit unions to explore investment opportunities or save their funds (when there is excess money in the box).


text:
English and Comparative Literary Studies (ECLS)
English and Comparative Literary Studies (ECLS) URC Student Scholarship
Human tessellations: Repetition as a mode of isolation in Ray K. Metzker's urban photography
dc.contributor.advisor Fineman, Daniel
dc.contributor.author Goldberg, Ethan
dc.description.abstract Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Poetics were the first texts to define art, not uncontroversially, as mimesis, the Greek term for imitation or representation. Artistic representation is often considered a mediation of a person or thing. Photographic representation is implicated by similar claims of inequality, complicated by the privileges the medium holds for its putative objective depiction of "reality." Many photographers after 1945 have self-consciously exploited photographic difference to resist habitual perception of the photograph and world. In 1964, forty years before Facebook launched, one such Milwaukee-born photographer, Ray K. Metzker, said "the single image [is] losing its appeal for me," and began a series entitled Composites that would continue until 1984. Each composite is a meticulously arranged assemblage of street photographs that vary from 12 x 12 inches to 75 x 38 inches. The composites question standard notions of perception, and in so doing, photography, by constructing a different visual experience out of quotidian activities and settings. Metzker questions the viewer's habitual perception for similar reasons as he self-consciously resists standard photographic composition: just like the image of things in one's mind, the photograph is not necessarily a result of pure or "natural" vision, but a function of rote, an internal predisposition that can be altered. Metzker's Composites suggest repetition in order to create a tension between sameness and difference. Many of the concepts outlined in Gilles Deleuze's first book of philosophy proper, Difference and Repetition, help elaborate on this theme.
dc.description.sponsorship Ford Research Mentors Endowment
dc.title Human tessellations: Repetition as a mode of isolation in Ray K. Metzker's urban photography
dc.type abstr
dc.description.department English and Comparative Literary Studies
dc.identifier.legacy https://scholar.oxy.edu/urc_student/1279